Only Global Growth Will Reflect True Value of AI: Microsoft CEO

At a time when global tech giants are racing to one-up each other in the development artificial intelligence, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said he cares much more about the value of global growth generated by the technology.

Speaking to US-based podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Nadella wrote off the hype around the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to say that what the world really needed to watch out for was an actual boost to GDP.

“If you’re going to have this explosion, abundance, whatever, commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth,” Nadella told Patel in a conversation early this month.

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“Remember the developed world, which is what? 2% growth and if you adjust for inflation it’s zero?” he added.

Referring to comparisons between AI and the Industrial Revolution, Nadella said the tech popularised by the explosion of ChatGPT first needed to bring in the level of growth brought on by the period that transformed global economy in the 18th century.

“That means to me, 10%, 7%, developed world, inflation-adjusted, growing at 5%. That’s the real marker,” Nadella told Patel.

“Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we’ll be fine as an industry,” he added.

Nadella’s views were a refreshing take on AI, especially considering his firm Microsoft has invested nearly $14 billion in OpenAI — at the cost of its profits last year.

Nadella’s remarks are especially significant as OpenAI, and its chief Sam Altman, have been racing to develop AGI. Altman has previously said that ‘going after AGI’ was one of OpenAI’s primary goals. OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.

“Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10%,” Nadella said on Patel’s podcast.

Productivity vs layoffs

Nadella’s views on AI’s real value reflecting in a boost to productivity comes at an awkward time considering thousands of people have been laid off already in favour of the technology.

And thousands more are set to lose their jobs in the future. Just on Monday, Singapore’s biggest bank DBS Group said it was planning to cut 4,000 temporary jobs over the next three years as it expected AI to increasingly take on roles carried out by humans.

“In my 15 years of being a CEO, for the first time, I’m struggling to create jobs,” DBS CEO Piyush Gupta was quoted as saying by Reuters.

The development is one that labour market experts have been concerned about since at least 2019, while calling for AI development in a way that it can benefit everyone.

Those calls are still being reiterated more than five years later. Last year, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said AI was hitting global labour forces “like a tsunami.” 40% and 26% of jobs in emerging markets and low-income countries were at risk from AI, she added.

More recently, last month, the World Economic Forum noted that while AI could add $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy, attention also needed to be paid to the “billions of dollars of economic harm” it will cause for people whose jobs will be disrupted by the technology.

“Our urgent task, therefore, is to prevent new social and economic gaps from appearing in the Intelligent Age,” it noted.

Nadella seemed to address some of those concerns as he spoke to Patel. He noted that AI didn’t need to replace ‘cognitive labour’ but instead act as a facilitator for productivity.

“Why can’t we exist in a world where there are powerful cognitive machines, knowing that our cognitive agency has not been taken away?”

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